A List for Our Times

Well, since I did promise Dave Humphrey that I would provide him a list of the fifty books that I think are most relevant to our time, and since I have already dodged this request on one occasion, and since he has reminded me of this situation more than once, here, at last, with many reservations, is my list.

Reservation the First: Though I have become more aware of the art of the list since I read Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, this list will have no art whatsoever. It will be alphabetical by author’s surname, without specific commentary of any kind.

Reservation the Second: I have not yet read very much in my life, and I can obviously draw my list only from those books that I have read, so this list will be hopelessly deficient.

Reservation the Third: I cannot possibly compare literary works with philosophical works, so I have divided the one list of fifty books into two lists of twenty-five, one for literature and one for philosophy. I know this is arbitrary, but will do it anyway.

Reservation the Forth and Most Serious: I am still completely uncertain of the criteria that one would use to determine which books are relevant to our times or any other times, so I am not sure how useful any list of mine will actually be.

However, for Dave’s sake and for the sake of anyone else who might conceivably care, these are the fifty books that I would say are relevant to our times.

Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse
Roland Barthes Mythologies
Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project
Maurice Blanchot The Instant of my Death
Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship
Martin Buber I and Thou
Michel de Certeau The Practise of Everyday Life
Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida The Politics of Friendship
Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge
Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred
George Grant Philosophy in the Mass Age
Martin Heidegger On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality
Soren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity
Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being
Georges Perec The Species of Spaces
Desmond Tutu No Future Without Forgiveness

Secondly, perhaps this list should be supplemented with another twenty-five entries of the history books and another twenty five entries of dramatics, that should most be read in relevance to our contemporary time.

Lauren, I was not humouring you. I was correcting an error in judgement. We will have to chat about this further the next time we meet.

Curtis, I have never been able to read more than a few pages of Tolstoy, and I have only read a single collection of essays from Chomsky. I did enjoy what I read of de Chardin, and I considered him for the list, but decided that there were other things that I preferred to him.